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I think we can agree that eBay and Amazon rule the online when it comes to customer ratings. But which is King in the world of online selling and shopping?

We can start by evaluating these two giants based on their revenues. According to Nytimes.com, eBay’s revenue climbed to $3.4 billion in the second quarter of 2012. The same article tells us that eBay’s stock gained more than 33 percent in the same time period, compared to a 25 percent gain in Amazon’s stock.

In the third quarter of 2012, Amazon’s revenue was less than analysts’ expectations: $13.18 billion in revenue, with 27 percent growth and an operating loss of $28 million, with a net income loss of $274. Amazon attributes this loss to its investment in LivingSocial. Based purely on this financial data, eBay seems to be doing better than Amazon.

But if we look past the revenues, which website do online shoppers prefer? EBay’s facebook page has a little over 5 million likes, with 80,000 people talking about it, whereas Amazon’s page has received a whopping 17 millions likes, with 330,000 people talking about it. We can also compare the traffic for each company’s main website: ebay.com and amazon.com, for the month of February 2013, for example. EBay received 405 million visits according to trafficestimate.com, while Amazon acquired 767 million visits.

Moreover, the forum from the aforementioned article shows that these consumers prefer Amazon to Ebay, in spite of what the numbers show. Consumers are convinced that Amazon has taken a loss because their strategy is, and has always been, to re-invest into the company. They prefer Amazon because they don’t “rip off” their customers, insinuating that Ebay does, and remark that hopefully, their “fairer” strategy won’t leave the company trailing behind competitors.

Peter Cheales (1994:98) puts it as follows: “If you can’t measure something, you can’t improve it”.
One of the key elements that makes Toyota SA’s TOUCH strategy so successful is the fact that they gather information from customer satisfaction surveys and after analysing the data, they are able to implement strategies to improve customer relation. The feedback from customers is used to improve service levels.
Since 1980’s Toyota has remained the market leader in the South African motor vehicle market, for example. The customer satisfaction index was converted from something abstract to real valuable data.

Analysing a case: WESBANK CSI
In 1994 the south african Bank WESBANK decided to implement customer satisfaction surveys to measure their impact on their customers, and learn from them experiences. The recolected data was analysed and it deliver some important data:
1. Staff’s knowledge of products and services was good
2. Their staff was professional
3. They gave enough and good advice
4. Customers apretiated the clarity of WESBANK documentation

Although most of the data recolected showed good feedback from their customers, the bank still decided to implement some improvement in certain areas, to strength customer loyalty.

It is thus obvious that customer’s perception of an organisation is of vital importance and plays a key role in the success of a company.